Here's a cropped version of the cover of 1969's With a Little Help From My Friends.

There was a terrible disease that was visited upon the white man in the 1960s. It was deemed as deadly as cholera and as easy to catch as mono from a kiss: If a dude loved a black singer, he felt compelled, in his suburban, self-conscious, sappy way, to imitate him, to appropriate that style as his own.

As a 10-year-old listener, I was subjected to plenty of these deluded Caucasians. If you require visual evidence, watch the film Woodstock and look for the band Ten Years After. Lead singer and guitarist Alvin Lee, born in Nottingham, England, tried so hard to sound like an African American ("Gawn home, baybuh!") that after his set he was probably dosed with antipsychotics, slapped, and told, "Yer from England, you stupid git!"

Yesterday, November 11, rap pioneer Henry "Big Bank Hank" Jackson of the Sugarhill Gang died of cancer at the age of 56.

Hank, Michael "Wonder Mike" Wright, and Guy "Master G" O'Brien were the three rappers on rap's first and arguably most identifiable hit, "Rapper's Delight." While not the first commercially released rap single, "Rapper's Delight" is often identified as the record that took rap from house parties to store shelves.

The effects "Rapper's Delight" had on the music business cannot be overstated. This was an entirely new genre, realistically only seven years old, that had no real precedent on radio. It was an avant-garde exercise disguised as a novelty that gave birth to an entire multibillion-dollar industry.

In February 2013, word spread that Bronx rapper Tim Dog died of a diabetic seizure at the age of 46. While the hip-hop community mourned the loss of the rapper famous for "Fuck Compton" and his work with Kool Keith, within weeks rumors spread that Tim Dog may have faked his death. It wouldn't seem that out of character for the rapper -- who'd seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to a two-hour NBC Dateline special that covered his nefarious recent years of scamming women on dating sites out of money -- to pull off the ultimate con, but this week Dateline's further investigation may have put the rumors to rest for good.

Yesterday, famously antagonistic Bronx-born rap artist Timothy "Tim Dog" Blair died of a diabetic seizure at the age of 46.

One of the most boisterously brash voices ever heard on a rap record, Tim Dog was the epitome of the hulking hip-hop bully archetype. Debuting in 1987 as the featured guest opener of Ultramagnetic MCs' "A Chorus Line," Dog premiered his signature style in his very first outing. By adopting Big Daddy Kane's famed syllable-chopping flow and morphing it from a smooth roll call of rhymes into an unrelenting barrage ("Procrastinator, laid her, hate her, played her, sprayed her / You wanna be taught? Later.") divvied up between statements that each sounded like a unique hybrid of boasts, threats and insults ("I'm so large, I boned your girl Emily"), Dog birthed one of the most consistently entertaining personas in hip-hop.

"There are things in my life that no one can understand except Aaron," Mickey Melchiondo noted of his bandmate Aaron Freeman in 2007, when theyas Dean and Gene Weenput out their last album, La Cucaracha. "We kind of have a parallel life. We went through everything together: junior high school, being broke, getting evicted, meeting our wives and ex-wives, having kids. We make, penny-for-penny, the same income, because we don't do anything other than the band. He's like my brother. And a lot of getting this record together was getting back to that. But there are other things where I can talk to anyone but Aaron."

Apparently, the same is true of Freeman, who perhaps accidentally announced Ween's breakup in an interview with Rolling Stone. "This is news to me," Melchiondo wrote on Facebook, "all I can say for now, I guess." Perhaps it's all a horrible mistake, something to be talked out as only two old friends can.

In the two-family house where I grew up in Bensonhurst, the two musical acts I heard most often, blasting from stereos at the top and bottom of the house, were the Beatles and Donna Summer.

The former was more my parents' speed, although my teenaged cousins who lived downstairs played the Fab Four plenty, too. But for me, my sister and my cousins, Donna was omnipresent. More than a disco queen, Summer was a deity we could call our own, a Boston native who recorded with Italians, married a Brooklyn paesano and fronted a group called Brooklyn Dreams. With that powerful, breathy-to-guttural-to-rafter-shaking mezzo-soprano, she recorded music of both florid grandeur and hard precision, the very essence of urban life in the 1970s.

She was, in short, an honorary New Yorker. Which I imagine is how hundreds of born-and-bred New Yorkers unconsciously regard the news today of her untimely death at age 63 from (reportedly) lung cancer. Regardless of where her upbringing and musical training had taken hera childhood and adolescence singing in churches in Dorchester, salad days in Germany in the musical Hair before she met her Berlin-based studio collaborator Giorgio MoroderDonna, to the end, belonged to all of us: outerborough ethnics; Manhattan velvet-rope aesthetes (and those who pretended); the gay, black and Latino communities.

Of course, if you're reading this in Detroit or Las Vegas or Minneapolis or Atlanta or Los Angeles or London, Donna spoke to you, too. Considering her lifelong association with a communal, hedonistic pop-culture moment, it's remarkable when one plays back her oeuvre how intimate, almost solitary her great works really were. Call her the Wanderer, for her ability to stretch, adapt and transmogrify dance music until it embraced everyone and everything.

On Thursday Kiss-FM announced that after 30 years, it would stop broadcasting on 98.7 FM and join forces with WBLS, its longtime rival in the "adult urban contemporary" radio format in New York City. The stations will merge under the motto "One Family, One Station, Our Voice," with several Kiss-FM personalities migrating to WBLS's roster of hosts.

Although all the talk of "merging" and "coming together" sounds nice, here's what's really happening: Kiss-FM is dead. Parent company Emmis Communications, who also owns Hot 97 and 18 other stations around the country, sold leased Kiss-FM's frequency to ESPN in a deal worth $96 million. Emmis executives say that the ratings show there simply isn't room in the market anymore for two "adult urban" stations. As of Monday, there will be only one spot on the dial for fans of old-school soul and R&B slow jams: 107.5 WBLS.

In recent years, Kiss-FM was the kind of station that played O'Jays "For The Love of Money," Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody", and a new Beyoncé track, back to back. It was a mix of soul, funk, R&B and disco catered primarily to older Black listeners, and a welcome respite from canned pop playlists during a long commute. But Kiss-FM's importance in radio history goes beyond today's throwback programming. Once upon a time, it was the very first station in the US to give fringe genre known as hip-hop a chance on primetime radio, helping to change the flavor of American pop culture forever.

Levon Helm died yesterday, at 71, from cancer. You didn't have to know him (as I did, faintly, fondly), to know that along with possessing one of the most moving voices and wickedest backbeats American music will ever know, that he had one of the most incredible, most surprising lives imaginable. Born into sharecropper poverty in Arkansas, he not only witnessed the birth of rock and roll, but helped to preside over its rebirth, when he (briefly) played drums behind the wild, discordant, drugdriven rawk created by one of his bosses, Bob Dylan. That group, his group, The Hawks, went from five years of godawful, you-need-speed-to-get-through-'em gigs at every roadhouse and bar in the U.S., to being The Band, the biggest, most fawned-over Musical Ensemble this country had ever seen. By 1969, there were elegant concert halls, stadiums, tons of dough, more ink than any rock and roll band had gotten since The Beatles. Then, for Levon and several of the others, came near-poverty and very hard times. Forget Faulkner or Steinbeck; his life could've been scripted by Fitzgerald.

Dick Clark was coolas in unflappable, not hip. That was key in an American 1950s where, for much of the nation, the latter condition was basically synonymous with "longhaired Commie fag degenerate." But Dick Clarkthat nice boy? No way was he any of those things, not in 1950s America, not for six decades as a TV presence as fixed and permanent as late-night infomericals, still to this day, thanks to GSN.

Clark's a game-show titan second only to Merv Griffin, but that's TV. Clark's role in musical history is both more and less ambiguous. Make no mistakeAmerican Bandstand, which Clark hosted from 1956 to 1989, did as much to legitimize rock & roll for Ma & Pa America as anybody before the arrival of the Beatles' "Aeolian cadences." Though the show existed for four years on local TV in Philadelphia before Clark became host, it was under him that it went into national syndication, and under him that it became one of the most copied programming formats ever devisedthe direct model for everything from local record hops real (e.g. this Idaho TV show, Seventeen, featuring a line dance to the Diamonds' "The Stroll") and imagined (The Corny Collins Show, from John Waters' classic 1988 film Hairspray). And, of course, it was the basis of Don Cornelius's Soul Train, which promptly began beating Bandstand's ratings in major cities around the U.S.